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judge.”
    “And then you’ll run for public office, like mayor or something?” I joked.
    “Mayor?” He paused. “Probably not. I don’t do well with crowds and public speaking. Supreme Court maybe. They submit their rulings in writing. Seems like the perfect fit.”
    Jack was arrogant, but at the same time his overconfidence was harmless and refreshing and made me want to know more about him.
    “Defenders probably see the good in everyone,” I said. “Prosecutors expect everyone to be a criminal. Don’t you have to take a stand in your heart?”
    “My heart? That’s a very emotional way of looking at the world.”
    “Tell me about growing up,” I said, wanting to change the subject.
    Jack named his childhood experiences like he was reading a grocery list. “New Jersey, public schools, wrestling team, single mom.” He paused slightly, then continued. “An only child, sort of. My mother was an employee at the New York Public Library. We struggled, to say the least. My mother was a saint, she never even raised her voice at me.”
    “You were
sort of
an only child?”
    Jack then told me how his father, Earl, had left his mother when he was still in diapers. Earl, a big-rig driver who spent a majority of the year on the road, met another woman, a beauty salon owner named Elsa. He gave up his trucker job, something he had refused Jack’s mom for years, and started driving a city bus instead. He didn’t disappear from Jack’s life. No, he did something much worse.
    “I ran into my father in school, in front of the principal’s office. I hadn’t seen him in years, couldn’t even remember the last time he’d spoken to me. For some odd reason that only a ten-year-old can comprehend, I felt he had come for me. Just when I was about to run into his arms, I heard the principal’s voice over the PA system.
George Connor, please come to the front office.
That was the day I learned of my half brother, George. And that we lived close enough to go to school together. Five blocks, to be exact.”
    I didn’t know what to say so I asked him about his mom. He let out a breath that sounded like a groan. “In a way, she killed herself,” he said, and I could tell it was an emotional subject for him. “She started working three jobs, trying to send me to private school after the whole incident with my brother. She wasn’t feeling well for a long time, and when she finally went to the doctor, it was too late. She had ignored all the signs for too long and was diagnosed with colon cancer. Eventually she had surgery but they just stitched her back up, there was nothing they could do. The cancer had spread to her brain and her liver.”
    I thought about my own family and how my mother didn’t seem to feel any guilt pursuing her photography career. I remembered all the nights without dinner on the table and the door to the darkroom locked. Many years after my parents had passed, I still couldn’t make up my mind if I should feel cheated out of her attention or happy she had a career of her own.
    That night, we broke the thirty-days-no-sex rule and madelove for the first time. It was a chaotic mess: him fidgeting with the condom wrapper and me not knowing where to put my legs. When I woke up the next morning, Jack was sitting in bed, furiously writing in a notebook.
    “Are you writing me a poem?” I asked jokingly.
    “A speech,” he said. Jack had been selected to deliver the keynote speech for an annual function sponsored by the New York City Bar Association for over eight hundred law students. For the next two weeks he outlined the speech, then revised it just to start all over again. The night of the event I watched him deliver the speech and didn’t see a hint of anxiety. He spoke with confidence, made eye contact, and told anecdotes and jokes. Something wasn’t right, there wasn’t even a hint of anxiety in his voice or his demeanor. Later I found out that speaking in front of crowds wasn’t his only